Date of Award

5-1986

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Geography and Anthropology

First Advisor

William Davidson

Abstract

The Toledo Settlement of southeastern Belize, today an East Indian community, was established in 1868 by 66 ex-Confederates. This study, a traditional historical geography, documents the major events that shaped the settlement and reconstructs the former Confederate community at its peak as well as the present East Indian landscape. Such a setting provides a superb opportunity to study the transition of cultural landscapes.

The early settlers cleared land and established 16 estates totaling 400 acres. They eventually prospered with the cultivation of sugar which occurred, in part, because of immigration into the settlement of East Indians to work as indentured sugar laborers. By 1890, the social and economic height of the Confederate settlement, 60 Americans and 200 laborers on 12 estates were producing 600 tons of sugar.

In the early 1900s when the American sugar farmers found they could not economically compete with European beet sugar, they abandoned the settlement triggering a transition from a Confederate settlement to one dominated by East Indian descendants of the indentured laborers. Rice became the crop of importance after a report in 1933 convinced the government that a shift to rice cultivation was necessary in Toledo to fill the void left after the decline of sugar.

Although no longer present, the Confederates have left their lingering mark in the material landscape, non-material landscape, and population composition of the Toledo Settlement. Today, the settlement is occupied by 500 residents, mainly East Indians living on five to 25 acre land tracts. Their landholdings and transportation network follow a basic spatial organization derived from the township-and-range system imposed by the Southerners.

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